Cities and other heavily urbanized areas may experience considerable human congestion at various locations around the world due to high human density. Therefore, public transportation mediums seeking to address the movement needs of local populations are often run at maximum capacity. As a result, individual passengers on subway train cars may be forced to be in physical contact with each other as the train travels to its next stop. Given that infectious disease, bacteria, allergens and/or other undesirable human-produced biologic material may easily spread in such high-density environments, many passengers choose to proactively wear protective hygienic face masks, like those used by surgeons and other medical professionals in an operating room, to guard against inhaling undesirable biologic material expelled by nearby passengers (e.g., through sneezing or coughing), and/or environmental-related contaminants (e.g., smoke, other forms of industrial air pollution and particulate matter).
However, such readily-available and mass-produced face masks may not be suitably equipped to attach, adhere, and/or otherwise combine the body of the face mask with eyewear, such as sunglasses. Thus, wearing sunglasses in combination with traditional face masks may require a wearer or user to choose whether to place the lenses of the sunglasses above the face mask, or to pull the face mask above the lenses, to form an interface between the lenses of the sunglasses and the face mask.
Choosing to pull the face mask above the lenses results in obscuring the wearer's line of vision through the sunglasses, which is an undesirable result. The remaining option, positioning the sunglasses on and/or above the face mask results in warm and moist exhaled air rising through the face mask upon exhalation by the user to coat the interior-facing lens surfaces of the sunglasses. Such surfaces allow the warm and moist exhaled air to condense thereon, resulting in the undesirable fogging up of the surfaces, also obscuring the wearers line of vision through the sunglasses.
Thus, there is a need for a comfortable, relatively inexpensive, readily-available surgical-type hygienic face mask adapted to combine and/or attach easily (i.e., via a foam layer that may have an adhesive associated therewith, or via the application of a removable semi-viscous liquid/gel coating between the face mask and the sunglasses) with sunglasses, of a variety of shapes and/or styles. The face mask may be oriented and combined with the eyewear such that exhaled air from the nostrils may be preferentially directed outwards through vents located on each side of the face mask, rather than rising upward to fog up and thus obscure vision through the interior-facing lens surfaces of the sunglasses. Furthermore, such a face mask should remain in a fixed position relative to a wearer's face, permitting for the wearer to freely turn and/or move his or her head while, for example commuting in a public train and/or bus to read material carried in hand.